I was so excited when the book first came out. I thought, Great! more fantasy! Plus all those reviews saying that if you liked Lord of the Rings you would like this one?(I'm a total LOTR freak.) Exactly the opposite! If you have read LOTR, even just skimmed through it, you will notice that there isn't a single original word in Eragon. THe land and creatures are way too much like LOTR, and the plot is carbon-copied from Star Wars, minute for minute. Oh yeah, and he never manages to even describe what his main character looks like! I was sorry I even bought the book after about two minutes into it. At first, I couldn't figure out for the life of me why Eragon had been published..but ofcourse! His parents published it. i hope, though, that once he gets out of this carbon-copying from other books stage he should be able to become a pretty good writer.
I think that all of the people that gave Eragon 5 stars haven't been able to read any of the great fantasy writers, such as McCaffrey, Pullman, McKinley, or better yet, just go back to the master who started it all: Tolkien. Eragon is just a really badly copied version of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. I mean, yeah, I can see how you would say that there isn't much of the Harry Potter influence in here, but nearly everything else is. Also, I've noticed that a lot of the people who like Eragon spen a lot of time calling names at people, but never actually get around to telling exactly why they like Eragon so much. Here are some example of why this book was copied from other books:

Eragon=Aragorn
Arya=Arwen
Brom=Gandalf
Galbatorix=Saruman
Beor=...Beor(oops, forgot to change the name there!)
Farthen Dur =Minas Tirith
Dwarves=dwarves
ELves=elves
The list could go on and on and on and on.

The only thing that comforts me is that Eragon will disappear in about 10 years, while LOTR has been going strong since the 1950's.